Affect in Macaques
Chapter 12 endnote 5, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:
[Eliza] found that the activity in the monkeys’ autonomic nervous system mirrored what a human’s would do when viewing these videos. In humans, this nervous system activity is related to the affect they feel, suggesting that macaques experience pleasant affect when watching positive behaviors like foraging and grooming, and unpleasant affect when watching negative behaviors like cowering.
The monkeys showed more sympathetic nervous system activity and less parasympathetic when watching movies of negative behaviors than when watching movies of positive behaviors, just as humans do. In humans, these nervous system changes correlates with people’s reports of unpleasant feelings.[1]
Notes on the Notes
- ↑ Bliss-Moreau, Eliza, Christopher J. Machado, and David G. Amaral. 2013. “Macaque Cardiac Physiology Is Sensitive to the Valence of Passively Viewed Sensory Stimuli.” PLOS One 8 (8): e71170. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0071170.